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Effective Fundraising

In my years of experience as a former coach and player, nothing raises funds the way an apparel sale does! Fan gear has always been a huge part of every program I participated in and the reasons are two-fold; (1) every mom, dad, uncle and grandma wants to wear their athlete’s logo front row and center on their chest. (2) There is a sense of pride seeing someone rocking your team’s mascot on their t-shirt! Additionally the club is able to market themselves and reinforce brand recognition through the influential means of sporting apparel. There just may be some truth in the saying “you look good, you play good”. Check out the Alton Redbirds Baseball’s team store they created for a great example of the Winito Athletics fundraising features. Also look at their impressive clothing banner advertisement on left side of their homepage.

Prep Sportswear Banner Advertisement

The Alton Redbird’s and every Winito Athletics client earns 15% commission on all sales generated from their site and they don’t have to deal with shipping, handling or inventory.

Another way for a team to generate funds is through the means of player and team donations. Throughout my years of playing sports, I found that the most effective way to collect donations is by asking close relatives or friends for small contributions. They are happy to donate knowing that the money is going to a good cause. Rougher Softball (Muskogee HS, OK) utilizes Winito Athletics PayPal donate feature by displaying the yellow donate button on the left hand side of their home page. This feature also allows an athlete to send a link to their player profile that has the donate button displayed directly on their profile page. A player’s fan can catch up on their stats and browse the team website before making a donation! it also saves the trouble of writing a check and putting it in the mail.

Sponsorship packages are also a great fundraising tool. Organizations can offer to print an ad for the sponsoring business in their Roster Booklet, print their logo on a Sponsor banner that the team carries with them game to game, or hang the banner in the team’s training facility. An organization can also get a website and provide an a company logo, link to their website and contact information. Sponsors benefit from teams using Winito Athletics because their webpage has a feature that allows extra advertisement running across the bottom of their team’s website. Temecula Valley High School Bears have their sponsors displayed proudly on their homepage , notice the scrolling banners across the bottom of the page and the dedicated “Sponsors” tab.

Temecula Valley Baseball – Sponsors Tab

Generating funds for a team is not as stressful as some may think if executed properly. Although some see fundraising as a way of asking strangers for money, it is more of an opportunity for people to show their support for an organization and their loved ones. Fans, family and sponsors enjoy seeing the teams they cheer for succeed which makes fundraising easy, especially through the usage of Winito Athletics!